A fun rhythm game that is far too short, but extremely fun and catchy while it lasts.
Playing as Lammy, guitarist for the band Milkcan, you wake up late, with only fifteen minutes to get to your big concert. On your way you encounter obstacles to your journey that you can 'solve' by playing guitar licks (via button combinations displayed in a rhythm bar) to match a song sung by a person in charge. From a discoish fire fighting song to a rap about flying an airplane, many genres are represented, each with their own challenges and hooks. Play well enough, and you can move past the challenge; play even better and you can do some free-form riffs. Play badly enough, you may not even get to finish the song. The songs fall off-tempo when you play poorly, giving you an audio cue to do better and some levels also punish you with distracting visuals when you play poorly, that make it all the more difficult to get back on track. Eventually you finally play well enough to make it to the concert for a final test to match your partner's playing to keep the audience happy, and in attendance.
As they had to be, the songs are the best part of the game; without that factor the game would be a massive disappointment. They are all fun, singable to a degree (repeat singing after each line will actually help you match the notes), and very catchy. The fun of the songs actually helps mitigate the difficulty of some of the levels, as you don't mind so much repeating some stages twenty times. The fact that the songs have repeated choruses is a huge help, as once you get them down, you can use them to make up prior bad play, boosting your current rating on the song.
The shortness of the game is a major letdown. There's only seven levels, and many will be able to complete the single player, standard story campaign in a mere two hours. The fluctuating difficulty is tough to get used to, as you may find yourself having to make double digit attempts to get past one song, but then sail through the next one on your first attempt. The fact that you're given effects to add to your guitar playing, like reverb and wah-wah, is nice except for the fact that you're generally too busy desperately praying to properly match the increasingly difficult combinations in the rhythm bar to even think about adding effects. The rhythm bar itself can be an issue, as it's often tough to tell when it's your turn, even with the optional controller vibration cue. It may change from your parter's song and your playing on their own lines, to shorter licks for each on a single line, spaced close together, with no warning. Hitting the right buttons is a challenge enough without obscuring when you're even supposed to begin. It's similarly tough during longer runs when it wraps across the screen, and getting that leftmost note after one at the rightmost edge of the screen can be quite punishing.
The game is fun, and once you get the rhythm thing down, controlling is very fluid, though like most rhythm games/mini-games, combos with the R and L shoulder buttons suffer a bit as they often ironically break your rhythm and never feel quite as intuitive as ones that just use the circle, X, square, and triangle buttons. The graphics have a sort of "South Park"-plus feel, with everyone basically 2-D cutouts, but you get that neat twisty/bendy effect when people turn around, and the cartoony look matches the quirky feel of the game. The sound is 90% the songs, which are all very well done, with neat choruses and generally likable partners to work with. The regular game is far too short, though there are some added-value items, like two player co-op and competitive play, and at the game's end there's a re-mix mode with slightly tweaked songs that you rap to as PaRappa, but you shouldn't expect the PaRappa mode to be any longer than the regular Lammy mode. What you're left with is a technically fine game, that's very fun and funny while it lasts, but unfortunately doesn't last long enough.